New York Yankee Lou Gehrig's Farewell (1939)

New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig, nicknamed the “Iron Horse,” was one of the most dominant major league players of the 1920s and ’30s -- playing in an astounding 2,130 consecutive games. So it came as a shock in 1939, when he retired at the age of 36 due to a yet-unnamed illness that would later bear his name (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease). In his touching farewell speech, delivered at Yankee Stadium, Gehrig famously reflected that, “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” He would die just three years later.

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